A systemic investigation and strategic design response to barriers to cycling in the car centric city of Turin

Abstract

Cycling is widely recognised as one of the most effective levers for making urban mobility more sustainable, healthy and liveable, yet its everyday adoption remains marginal in most Western cities. This thesis investigates that contradiction through the case of Turin, Italy, a city that is morphologically well suited to cycling, predominantly flat and compact, with almost every neighbourhood within a 7 km radius of the centre, but that records one of the highest motorisation rates in Europe (approximately 757 cars per 1,000 inhabitants) and a cycling modal share of only around 3% of daily trips. Turin therefore offers an emblematic example of a "Starter" city, where favourable spatial conditions coexist with a deeply rooted car-centric culture inherited from its industrial past.

The research addresses a gap in the existing literature, which has tended to analyse barriers to cycling in isolation and to draw on cities with long-established cycling cultures whose solutions cannot be directly transferred to car-dependent contexts. Against this background, the study asks how local decision-makers can be supported in prioritising and addressing the most critical barriers to cycling adoption in Turin.

The investigation follows a qualitative, design-oriented process structured around the Double Diamond model. It combines a structured literature review based on the PRISMA framework, which organises the barriers to cycling into five macro-categories; a contextual analysis of Turin's spatial, cultural and institutional conditions; and an empirical phase based on eighteen semi-structured interviews, fifteen with everyday mobility users (distinguished between cyclists and non-cyclists) and three with field experts in cycling mobility. The findings are then translated into design priorities through a multi-criteria prioritisation framework that combines three dimensions drawn from the empirical data: perceived relevance for users, and perceived impact and difficulty of intervention for experts.

The analysis confirms that barriers to cycling in Turin operate as an interdependent system spanning infrastructural, behavioural, cultural and institutional dimensions, rather than as isolated obstacles. Three findings prove particularly significant. First, a consistent gap emerges between user perception and expert evaluation: users anchor their assessments in what they directly experience, such as network discontinuity and unsafe intersections, while experts identify latent and systemic conditions, such as car-culture dominance and institutional lock-in, that operate beneath the threshold of everyday awareness. This asymmetry has direct design implications, since the barriers most visible to potential cyclists are not necessarily those most resistant to change, and effective strategies must address both registers at once. Second, the institutional framing of cycling as a sustainability measure is misaligned with how cyclists actually experience it, namely as a source of personal autonomy, wellbeing and enjoyment. Third, the formation of cycling habits in childhood emerges as one of the most durable and underexploited levers for long-term change.

These insights inform a two-layer design response. The first layer is a strategic roadmap that translates the prioritisation framework into a shared, evidence-based reference tool for local decision-makers, sequencing interventions across time horizons, thematic domains and levels of institutional responsibility. The second is Turin Bike Kids Club, a web-based platform that collects, structures and circulates initiatives supporting cycling normalisation among children and in school contexts. Beyond its outputs for Turin, the thesis contributes a replicable methodological process for translating locally grounded barrier research into strategic design intervention, one applicable not only to other cities with low cycling maturity but also to other domains of active mobility, and more broadly to any context where a widely recognised practice fails to achieve actual adoption.